It’s a bottomless pit of wrong. It’s a veritable
loaves-and-fishes of wrong. It’s the gift that keeps giving.

So I keep going back to it to find humorously
inaccurate things I missed before.

One thing that jumped out
at me today was this: Mamet, like so many people who obsess over firearms, telescopes the early phase of
American history in an effort to weave the Founder’s justification for armed
rebellion into the text of the Constitution itself. “The Constitution’s
drafters,” Mamet
says, “did not require a wag to teach them that power corrupts: they had
experienced it in the person of King George.”He
then goes from quoting the Declaration of Independence –

The American secession
was announced by reference to his abuses of power: “He has obstructed the
administration of Justice … he has made Judges dependant on his will alone … He
has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our
Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws … He has erected a multitude of
new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass out people and to eat
out their substance … imposed taxes upon us without our consent… [He has]
fundamentally altered the forms of our government.”

It was to guard us
against this inevitable decay of government that the Constitution was written.
Its purpose was and is not to enthrone a Government superior to an imperfect
and confused electorate, but to protect us from such a government.

As if they were essentially one and the same.

Of course, anyone who passed an eighth grade civics
class knows that the Declaration of Independence isn’t part of the
Constitution. Indeed, the Declaration and the Constitution weren’t
even written very close together in time. The Declaration was written in 1776; the
federal Constitutional
Convention wasn’t convened until 1787, and the Constitution itself wasn’t
ratified until 1789.
Congress then adopted the Amendments
which became known as the Bill of Rights (including the Second Amendment) in
1789, and those Amendments became
in effective in 1791 after ratification by the States.

More importantly, to whatever extent the Venn
diagram of the men we call the Founders, on
the one hand, and the drafters of our Constitution, on the other, might have
overlapped, what matters, for purposes of constitutional law, is the
Constitution. Even if the members
of the Second Continental Congress in 1776 were identical – to a man – to the
delegates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, we’re bound by the
Constitution they drafted, not what they said eleven years prior.

And so the question isn’t whether the signatories
to the Declaration of Independence thought that an armed populace would keep
the government honest, as Mamet seems to suggest when he writes,
“They realized that King George was not an individual case, but the inevitable
outcome of unfettered power; that any person or group with the power to tax, to form laws, and to enforce
them by arms will default to
dictatorship, absent the constant unflagging scrutiny of the governed, and
their severe untempered
insistence upon compliance with law.”

The real question is, how did they feel about it by
the time they drafted the Constitution? Unsurprisingly, the Constitution
actually provides the answer, right in Article I, Section
8:

The Congress shall have
Power …

To provide for calling
forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and
repel Invasions …

So it would appear that the drafters of our
Constitution were none to keen on the notion that armed insurrection was a good
way to keep government honest. Then again, it was
Declaration-of-Independence-signing John Adams who, as President in 1798,
signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts, which, as the Library of
Congress explains, “increased the residency requirement for American citizenship
from five to fourteen years, authorized the president to imprison or deport
aliens considered ‘dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States’ and restricted
speech critical of the government.”
(Emphasis supplied.)

My point is not to diminish the Declaration of
Independence as perhaps the greatest political manifesto of all time. My point
is that the extent to which the government can regulate firearms is a constitutional question. And the Constitution, as
the Supreme Court has acknowledged, does, indeed, permit some regulation of
firearms and the ownership of firearms. Romanticizing the issue the way Mamet
and so many others do today – imagining themselves to be 21st century Minute
Men; the guardians of liberty against some imaginary totalitarian threat –
serves only to obscure the really important discussion we need to have about
the precise contours of the Second Amendment, as defined by the Supreme Court,
and about what the government should or shouldn’t be doing within the scope of
what’s constitutionally permissible.

2 comments:

This whole notion being propagated recently by the NRA and its minions that the 2nd Amendment, unlike all the others, is utterly absolute and unassailable from any quarter fails the test of the history of the Bill of Rights. No one accepts it in any other context. For example, while no one disagrees that the right of petition is as close to an absolute guarantee as there ever could be, no one would argue that while driving down the Pennsylvania Turnpike to deliver said petition you were exempt from the payment of tolls. The Congress and State legislatures may from time to time, at their discretion, ease the practice of certain Bill of Rights liberties by, for example, granting a free franking privilege to mail sent to the Medicare Inspector General or exempting the sanctuary portion of a church from property taxes--but there is no RIGHT to not have a sprinkler system, exit sign, or fire alarm in the building.

And certainly no Amendment has been subject to more agonizing hair splitting on its precise meaning than the 4th. "Secure in their person..and effects" and "shall not be violated... " seem like a pretty straightforward wordings. Yet here we police snatching phones and reading text messages arguing that a personal cell phone carried in your pocket is not an "effect"--something that would seem nonsensical to any reasonable person. Indeed, I'm sure the exceptions, counter-exceptions, rules, and exclusions in this area could fill a library.

The only problem is that when you apply such a line of reasoning in any argument with the Type2A gunzloonz, they immediately get that "Come to Jesus moment" look in their eye and lose whatever tenuous connection they might have with reality.

President Obama actually mis-spoke back there in 2008 when he said that some disaffected people cling to their guns and their religion. They cling to theirs guns AS a religion.